Ursula's New Groove: a pose gene case study

[Originally written August 2 2020]

Thanks to a genetic engineering tutorial and a tool called Nornimator that allows me to pose creatures, I was able to (mostly) unlock the secrets of pose genes. Animation cycles (like walking) are determined by gait genes, which are lists of poses to string together. The pose genes in turn consist of a 16-character string like this: X12020322222311X. For readability, I may split these strings up into sections. With the exceptions of the first and last characters, each one indicates an angle for a body part. The first one indicates the direction the creature is facing, and the last one, as far as I can tell, is unused. Likely it’s either a remnant of Creatures Village or a result of the “sacredness” of powers of two in computer programming.

The valid characters for each slot are as follows, mostly according to the tutorial. It didn’t mention 4, but I saw it in a pose that I knew had the creature’s head facing the camera when its body was not, so while I haven’t seen 5-7, I assume that it would just be the same angle pattern repeating but with the head facing the player. I’ve also seen ? for the head slot, but I don’t really understand what it means.

Slot	Char.	Meaning
Direction	0	Away from camera
	1	Facing camera
	2	Right
	3	Left
	X	Same as it was before
	?	Toward object of interest
	!	Away from object of interest
Body Parts	X	Same as it was before
	0	Far down
	1	Down
	2	Level
	3	Up
Head	4	Facing camera, far down
	5	Facing camera, down
	6	Facing camera, level
	7	Facing camera, up
	?	Unknown

Armed with this new knowledge, I cracked open Ursula the Dancing Grendel’s genome to find out why she’s a member of the Ministry of Silly Walks. According to a gene comparison report, she has no gait mutations compared to a standard Jungle Grendel, though she does have two additional special gaits inherited from the Banshee Grendels. She does, however, have several mutated pose genes, which I did not want to write another complicated data table for. The important thing is, nearly all of her pose changes are in the arms, body, or head. The only leg position mutations are in her slapping and eating poses. None of these should make her do her funky dance walk. 

But what she does have is a single pose with an age category mutation. Essentially, creatures have three normal walk animations – the baby crawl they’re born with, the adult walk they get when they become a child, and the shuffle they get when they become old. Ursula has a mutation that caused her to get Pose 3 of her old age walk early, upon reaching adulthood, but the other three poses involved in the walk cycle won’t change to match until she actually becomes old.

As I decoded, built, and then photoshopped an animation out of the poses, I discovered that Ursula’s problem is much more severe than I thought; her ability to move at all must have come from uneven terrain (allowing her to use the uphill and downhill gaits), as she can’t really move forward at all on level ground. She’s definitely a special needs creature.